I am the author of 16 books on artificial intelligence and the semantic web. I use this blog to share ideas and code snippets using my favorite languages: Clojure, Java, Haskell, Common Lisp, and Ruby.

Tuesday, July 05, 2011

Apache Google Wave in a Box project is starting to look good

It has been a long time since I tried to run the wave protocol stuff. I just grabbed the latest source and followed these directions on my MacBook. I was quickly up and running with no problems.

The web UI is a lot simpler than Wave but looks similar. Wave in a Box is looking good as a development platform - something to customize for your organization.

I used two browsers, Chrome and Safari to create two test accounts, and as I expected, the real time messaging, etc. worked fine.

Hello Dale, I have not used it as my own dev platform. I am just thinking ahead, thinking that WIAB could be very useful in private company-internal settings. Another good use could be also allowing customers to have accounts on a private setup for sharing work notes, schedules, etc.

"The Robots API has now also been included in Wave in a Box and has most of the functionality available on Google Wave." ref: http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2010/11/adding-robots-to-wave-in-box.html

I have not tried robots yet. (I am painfully busy in my consulting business right now - experimenting time is limited.)

My team found Wave to be extremely useful for keeping track of daily tasks, even when we were spread out in various locations. In the end, it's flexibility was what killed it. People opened it up and had no idea what to do with it.

I don't know all the things it could be used for, but here is what I know it is good for:Task and Project Management(dragging and dropping deliverables to a completed task was very useful)Team Modeling Sessions (in our case we were working on data models)

Hello RunLove, those sound like good use cases. I had hoped to spend a fair amount of time with WIAB but my workload precluded that, for now. I expect a healthy open source community to build up around WIAB - a cool and useful project.